[Am-info] Microsoft and XML and micro-content

[Gene Gaines]

I find much food for thought in the story below, from eWeek, at:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1479235,00.asp

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No Free Lunch: Microsoft Fumbles the Patent Ball
By Steve Gillmor
January 30, 2004

Microsoft has coupled royalty-free licensing with its Office XML
schema patent filings, but the move may turn out to be very
expensive indeed.

Microsoft's decision to drop the other shoe on Office 2003's XML
schemas may come back to haunt it. News reports of patent filings
with New Zealand and the European Union triggered fears that
third-party vendors would be prevented from accessing Office
documents without licensing the new formats.

According to a reply from Mark Martin of Microsoft's PR firm to
San Jose Mercury News columnist (and smarter younger brother) Dan
Gillmor, "Microsoft filed for a patent in New Zealand (#525484)
and that patent application covers a software innovation that
relies in part on XML."

And later, "The presence of this patent application in New Zealand
does nothing to change the commitment Microsoft made this past
November when it announced the [availability] of a royalty-free
licensing program for our Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas." A
November 2003 press release dryly notes, "The initiative came
about after fruitful discussions with the Danish Government."

It's no coincidence that Microsoft announced the "opening" of the
Office Schema licenses at a time when the software giant is under
pressure to settle the six-year antitrust probe by the European
Union. And just as with its DRM licensing, just because it's free
now doesn't mean it will continue to be down the road once market
share reaches a dominant position.

But getting to 90 percent share or greater =97as Microsoft did with
Windows, Office and Internet Explorer=97will not be as easy this
time. Oddly, Redmond seems blinded to the reality of the new Web
operating system, where technologies such as RSS are pushing the
marketplace toward small XML fragments called micro-content and
away from bulky Word documents.

Part of the problem is of Microsoft's own making. The company's
reluctance to cannibalize the Office file formats has slowed down
Outlook's move to an XML underpinning. For years now, Outlook's
XML object model has trailed other Office apps. Luckily for
Redmond, office suite competitors such as Lotus and Novell
imploded at the same time. Even now, Sun's OpenOffice has cloned
the Microsoft hairball rather than producing micro-content objects
that could be stitched together to create the same kind of rich
compound documents.


Living in the Micro-Content World

In a micro-content world, business documents are broken down into
their constituent elements: notification, transaction, context,
priority and lifetime. IM traffic, Weblog posts, breaking news,
appointments, alerts and good old e-mail comprise a dominant
percentage of micro-content traffic. Managing the real-time flow
of information becomes Job One, followed closely by archiving and
publishing snapshots of the data as "documents."

The traditional productivity applications become rendering engines
for various end-stage documents. Word produces spell-checked,
formatted pages; Excel produces reports, charts and graphs;
PowerPoint produces presentations. In its current incarnation,
Outlook renders messages. FrontPage=97well, FrontPage is being
sunsetted by Weblog-authoring tools.

To be sure, Microsoft can take comfort in its strategy of waiting
for the competition to do the R&D and then swooping in when the
market is primed. Micro-content authoring tools are in their
infancy, held back by the lack of resources in mom-and-pop RSS
aggregator shops. But the patent filings are giving companies such
as Apple and Sun time to seed their platforms with common services
that can be bootstrapped by small ISVs.

With e-mail attacks becoming the norm, Microsoft shops must devote
more and more cycles to combating the enterprise effects of
network slowdowns; unreliable communications; and loss of
strategic data to uncaptured channels such as IM, voice and
Hotmail back channels.

That's why social software spaces and link cosmos engines such as
Technorati are becoming mission-critical repositories for
maintaining secure communications. As RSS information routers
reach the critical mass of persistent, searchable storage,
feed-tunable preferences, embedded browser rendering, and
attention data mining, the motivation to store data in licensed
document silos will flatline.

Remember: Microsoft is competing in the micro-content space with
the one non-renewable resource: time. Nowhere in the real-time
space does it have dominant market share=97not in IM, not in RSS,
not in search. If it places its chips on Word, it's competing not
just against micro-content, but against its own installed base.

There are some signs that Gates gets it: hiring Wiki inventor Ward
Cunningham, incorporating some OneNote technology into the next
Mac Office release and even floating a rumor that he will start an
internal blog. But Longhorn still reminds me of the Las Vegas
skyline, where objects appear a lot closer than they really are.